The Hustle (29 page)

One of Pollock's focuses had been the theory of “white privilege,” which puts forward the idea that white people benefit from their skin color in countless ways of which they are often unaware. One widely distributed essay on the subject lists fifty examples, including:

When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

Pollock says she made her stance clear when she interviewed for the job at Lakeside. “I told them that antiracism is what I teach,” she says. “You can put whatever name on it you want, you can call this an English class, or a sociology class, or whatever, but I'm going to teach antiracism and I'm going to use all my tools to do that.” Sims, too, focused on “social justice,” teaching about things such as imperialism and colonialism in his world history courses.

Pollock, as might be expected from her track record, immediately began to talk about racial issues in a more direct manner than the school was used to. As she recalls, things began to heat up at the start of her second semester, in January 2005, when the Upper School held its Martin Luther King Jr. Day assembly. A number of teachers, both white and black, participated in a panel discussion about their experiences during the 1960s. T. J. Vassar, the diversity director, spoke about being one of the first black students at the school in 1965. A white teacher spoke about not remembering there being many black people around when he was a kid. Pollock talked about her family being one of the first to integrate a white neighborhood in Chicago. “I said something very, very controversial at that point,” Pollock tells me. “I said that if someone grows up in America, I mean everybody, you cannot help but be racist, because our culture is racist, and boy, did that set off a firestorm.” The reaction was immediate, with students at the assembly yelling out in protest. What a lot of white students took away, David Changa-Moon tells me, was that Pollock had just called all white people at Lakeside racists.

At another assembly, a few months later, one of Pollock's students, a girl of East African origin, gave a PowerPoint presentation that quoted various comments that had been made to her during her time at the school. They ranged from fairly innocuous to the bluntly offensive, including,

If I went down to the South End, would I get beat up by all the black people?

Is it true that black guys have big packages?

If people in Africa are starving and dying, then why don't they just eat the dead to stay alive?

We should put every AIDS-infected person on an island and burn them. That's the only way of solving the AIDS epidemic.

The next day, the school had an extended advisory period to talk about the presentation. Changa-Moon tells me, a bit wryly, that the main effect this had was keeping race front and center as a subject of discussion.

In May, an African-American student in the freshman class sent a heartrending poem by e-mail to all faculty and staff that described his feelings of isolation at home and at the school. It began: “How does it feel? I see this boy every day. He goes to school where almost everyone is the opposite color. I don't think it bothers him but I wonder how it feels. How does it feel to go to a place and know that everyone sees you as a failure?”

Pollock responded with a letter—titled “Be Ware of the Damage a Good Heart Can Do”—e-mailed to the same group, in which she admitted to deeply conflicted feelings about the diversity push: “What becomes of the community, and what responsibility does Lakeside have to those communities as we harvest their ‘best and brightest'? Do other communities come and harvest the white children who are ‘able and willing' to come to the top institutions which are not white and ask them to learn how to survive and function and be judged by standards that have nothing to do with their own identity?”

Pollock tells me that Noe told her to “slow down,” that she was pushing change too fast. She recalls meeting with Noe in his office, under the poster of Martin Luther King Jr. “I told him that's what people said to Martin, they told him to slow down, they told him to wait, and here you are honoring him forty years later telling me the same thing,” she says, laughing. “He didn't like that too much.”

By the fall semester of 2005, when Bill Gates kicked off the fund-raising drive, the situation at the school had deteriorated. One of the newly hired Latina teachers let it be known that she planned on leaving. Novella Coleman, the African-American Stanford graduate in her first year of teaching, was having a horrible time in her math classes, getting questioned by kids about her qualifications and her competence. In class, one kid asked if she had gotten into Stanford on an athletic scholarship. Another asked if she was from Compton, the Los Angeles neighborhood known in rap songs as the home of the Crips and the Bloods. When she said she wasn't, he pressed ahead with a series of questions about what the area was like. When Coleman was questioned by a female student about something she wrote on the whiteboard, another girl in the class turned to the student, wagged her head, snapped her fingers, and said “You told her!” in way that made Coleman think the girl was trying to imitate the stereotype of a sassy black woman. After a couple of months, Coleman announced that she would resign at the end of the year.

“I felt like students were holding me under the microscope, I felt attacked by parents, and I felt marginalized by those who claimed to be addressing my concerns. I was miserable because while I have undergone a lot of personal growth to be in a place where I viewed my race and culture as an asset, I knew that at Lakeside my race and culture were liabilities,” she wrote right before she left the school. She had, she said, “been reduced to tears at the thought of returning to Lakeside or even spending another moment there.”

In the meantime, a group of parents had begun to push back against all the diversity talk. Some wondered why they were spending more than $20,000 a year to have their kids take part in a social experiment. The parents also claimed that admitting more minority students to the school was lowering standards. Others objected to the political bent that teachers such as Pollock and Chance Sims were taking. Did diversity just mean left-wing political views? What about ideological diversity as well?

In an effort to address those complaints, Noe—at the suggestion of a staff member—invited Dinesh D'Souza to speak at the school's annual spring lecture, which comes with a $10,000 speaking fee. D'Souza, a former Reagan staffer who was then a fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institute at Stanford, has long been a conservative firebrand. His books cover subjects such as the evils of political correctness, the triumph of Ronald Reagan, the greatness of America, how the depravity of the cultural left resulted in the 9/11 attacks, and his latest,
What's So Great about Christianity
. If Noe wanted to throw some red meat to conservative parents, D'Souza was certainly the guy to bring it.

D'Souza was supposed to speak about the war in Iraq, but it was his views on African Americans that attracted attention. In 1995, D'Souza published
The End of Racism
, a polemic about race in America. In the book, he asserts that slavery was not a racist institution; that blacks do not achieve as high as whites because of “cultural deficiencies”; that black “cultural pathology” has contributed to a new form of discrimination, which he calls “rational discrimination”—because some blacks commit crimes, it is logical that there is prejudice against all of them; that segregation was a benevolent system put in place to protect blacks from whites who might harm them; and that inner-city streets “are irrigated with alcohol, urine and blood.” D'Souza comes to the conclusion that racism might still exist in some minor form, but it is liberals and blacks themselves who are the problem. His solution is to do away with affirmative action and the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Also, blacks should learn to “act white.” “If America as a nation owes blacks as a group reparations for slavery, what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?” D'Souza asks.

In the book, D'Souza praises black conservatives Glenn Loury and Robert Woodson Jr. as part of a small group that consists of “the only people who are seriously confronting black cultural deficiencies and offering constructive proposals.” Both men held positions at the American Enterprise Institute along with D'Souza, who was a fellow at the think tank. After
The End of Racism
came out, both resigned in protest. Loury wrote, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that in some influential quarters, when the object of discussion is the African-American community, basic principles of decency and of scholarly and journalistic integrity no longer apply. Blacks seem to be held in such contempt that we can be slandered, defamed and insulted without remorse or consequence.”

In a faculty meeting during the first week of January 2006 called by Noe to discuss issues of race on campus, Chance Sims brought up Dinesh D'Souza and spoke about how offensive he found D'Souza's views. When a white staff member took responsibility for recommending D'Souza to Noe, Sims told her, “Shame on you.” That prompted a white male teacher to stand up and tell Sims he had no right to speak that way. The meeting, which had been meant to soothe nerves, only heated up simmering tensions among the faculty.

Noe tried to make the D'Souza appearance a “teaching moment.” Terrance Blakely tells me that students were given eighty-five pages of
The End of Racism
to read and then discuss with their teachers. Blakely was “disgusted” by the book and by the idea that the school would consider hosting a speaker whom Blakely felt wrote hate speech about African Americans. For Blakely, it stripped everything down to reveal the power differential at the school. “You have kids saying, ‘I feel offended and I feel threatened that you're bringing this guy to the school,' and they say, ‘Well, he's not here to talk about that so he won't really touch on that issue, so you'll be OK.' And then it's just like, ‘Well, if I had a little bit more money behind me, or if I had a little bit more power, I bet this would be different.' ”

With pressure from teachers and students mounting, Noe canceled D'Souza's speech. (The school, which still had to pay D'Souza's fee, ended up substituting William Kristol, a prominent neoconservative.) The cancellation incensed many parents and alumni, who saw it as censorship. The local press soon got wind of the whole mess, followed shortly by right-wing blogs and the national media. When D'Souza appeared on FOX News's
Hannity & Colmes
, Lakeside issued a statement: “We realized Mr. D'Souza's presence could cause emotional pain to many at our school including our increasingly diverse student body.” D'Souza chatted amicably with the sympathetically outraged hosts—Susan Estrich was subbing for Colmes—for a few minutes, blaming his cancellation on Lakeside's “Kabbalah” faculty before the show cut to Greta Van Susteren, who had an update on a young, white American woman gone missing in Aruba.

The situation at Lakeside continued to worsen. A few weeks after the D'Souza uproar broke out, Pollock taught in her American Cultural Literacy class, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, King's “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” as well as the response of the city's white clergy to King's calls for desegregation. She asked the students to look at how the clergymen called blacks in Birmingham “our negroes” and labeled King an “outside agitator.”

Pollock tells me that a few boys in the class began to question her. “They not only denied the possessiveness of the language, this one person and two of his friends, every word I said they argued back, every word that I said they questioned,” Pollock says. “So I started talking about the concept of possessiveness, of whites possessing blacks, about how the first laws instituting slavery were laws against women, so that a white man could create his own workforce by buying a woman and raping her, and raping all of his children, raping his daughter and raping his granddaughter, and I said that directly that way, I said that's how black people came to look like me.”

The boys questioned how Pollock, who is light-skinned with reddish hair and freckles, knew it was rape. Couldn't a slave love her master? they asked. Sensing that the discussion was getting out of hand, Pollock tells me, she cut it off. One of the students then told her, “By stopping this conversation, you are intellectually raping us.” Pollock says she ended the class, had the students leave, and wrote up what had happened. Later that day, she says, she walked into the lunchroom and overheard the boy who accused her of “intellectual rape” bashing her to a group of students. Pollock walked up and told him, “You're not the first little white boy to challenge me, and you won't be the last.”

In response, Noe placed Pollock on probation. The school's academic director arranged a meeting between Pollock and the boys. Pollock says the boys accused her of “exploiting” her students. Pollock, at that point, felt that the administration was not going to give her any support, so she resigned.

After Pollock disappeared from the school—the administration said she left for “health reasons”—Chance Sims, on February 14, sent an e-mail to the school's staff titled “A Valentine for Kim Pollock.” It read, in part, “Some will say that [Pollock] was uncompromising, antagonistic, difficult and selfish but those who knew her knew that she was a rare individual with a heart and mind that was unmatched. I have heard administrators say that her departure was inevitable. After learning that the administration is spending hundreds of hours dealing with the D'Souza debacle, I'm left to wonder how this school might look if the administration spent hundreds of hours supporting retention efforts.” Sims closed the e-mail by quoting Pollock's favorite passage from the Audre Lorde essay “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” which reads, in part: “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”